Focus Mares, tweaks and swaps, and some photos

I decided that the Salsa Woodchipper 2 is just too wide for me.  46cm wide at the levers is very wide, and the lower part of the drops flares out even more.  I have a set of 42cm Deda bars and swapped them.  The next ride will tell me if the bars and levers are in the right places.

UPDATE: The bar swap worked fine.  Better feel for me, so they’ll stay.

I bought some replacement lever hoods since one of them has a tear already.  They’re on the way here, and it should be a fairly easy job to swap them.  Then once the bar and lever positions are set, I’ll wrap the bars.

UPDATE:  Replacing the lever hoods turned out to be a bigger project than I had anticipated.  I wound up removing the lever blade to get the hoods installed.  But it’s done, and the new hoods are much tighter to the lever body than the old ones.  The bars are wrapped, and I’m calling it done.

I took the pedals off the Parlee Z3 (a set of Shimano M8120 SPD pedals) and put them on the Focus.  I have a set of M9120 SPD pedals on the way, they will go on the Parlee when they arrive.

UPDATE: Pedal swap complete, and the Parlee has the M9120 pedals installed.

The bar swap made a noticeable difference in the way the bike rides.  The pedals didn’t make a a big difference, but these M8120 pedals are practically new, probably less than 200 miles on them.  All of my bikes have SPD pedals.

For those of you that followed the build project, here are some photos of the finished bike.

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